BY STEWART SLATER
- The Olympic caravan has moved out and the Paralympic caravan has moved in. In contrast to its able-bodied cousin, the Opening Ceremony featured a cast no-one outside the “hexagon” had heard of and confused pretension for profundity (“challenging” is often a synonym for “unwatchable”), making it authentically French. But it probably had to be. Parity of esteem may be an oft-used buzz-phrase, but the absence of Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise et al suggests it hasn’t yet reached Hollywood’s A-listers…
- In attendance, however, was Keir Starmer. Wearing a suit. Quite possibly one of the suits a donor bought him. For our 61-year-old Blessed Leader despite (according to Google) being worth £8mn and having earned the Leader of the Opposition’s salary (currently £145,000) for several years still needs someone else to pay for his clothes. And his spectacles. As so often with the Prime Minister, it is unclear whether one should condemn his character (the dirty, grasping cheapness displayed in this instance) or pity his lack of self-awareness.
- Still, at least he didn’t speak at the Opening Ceremony. For Starmer is no orator (whatever the outcomes of his other policies, his efforts to reduce the nation’s energy usage will, I am confident, be a success – every time he comes on the TV, I turn it off). Part of the problem is his tone, part his language. He uses phrases suited to a middle management meeting (which could definitely have been an email) in his addresses to the nation. The only people who “move at pace” are those who have read too many airport management books.
- The trip to Paris came on the back of a trip to Berlin and suggestions of a deal to secure free-ish movement for young people. Of course, if one wanted to maximise the opportunities for the nation’s youth, one would seek to send them to economically vibrant Asia and Africa rather than moribund Europe. But there has long been a paradoxically parochial mindset amongst the Britons quickest to sneer at “Little Englanders” which prevents them seeing further than the Continent. Mediocrity, as Conan Doyle said, knows nothing higher than itself.
- Or perhaps the Prime Minister believes that the country’s young cannot handle the thrusting aggression of the developing world, needing to confine themselves to sedate and genteel shores. The soft bigotry of low expectations, as someone once said.
- That man was a graduate of Yale and back in the day (the 2000’s) that was a perfectly respectable thing for an American politician to be. But no more. For Kamala Harris’ running mate spends most of his time attacking his opponent for the crime of having attended his country’s second-best (I am, formally, a Harvard drop-out. Long story) university.
- Tim Walz was a high school football coach and like P.E. teachers the world over appears to like the kids who can pass a ball and dislike those who can pass an exam (as we were saying, mediocrity knows…). But his elevation reveals another fascinating contrast between the Old Country and the New. For, in the opinion of those who study such things, having been a high school coach is a positive reason for voting for him. Americans, apparently, want the coach to be in charge. Over here, the situation, I think, is different. Generally portrayed as barely literate knuckle-draggers with sadistic tendencies, the games master is the last person anyone would put in power.
- The Democratic Convention coincided with results season and, as happens every year, Katherine Birbalsingh of the Michaela School took to X to tout her students’ excellent as always results and their university destinations (her online presence can, on occasion, give the impression of someone who has come to believe her publicity more than might be advisable. “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress” might be a fun nickname but using it as a web address might suggest the sort of page which would lead to the immediate defenestration of any Tory MP found to have visited it while in the chamber…). Walz takes pride in the fact that none of the students at his school went to Yale, she in the fact that some of hers are going to Cambridge. Which is the go-ahead country in which everyone can maximise their talents, and which the hide-bound society which wants its citizens to know their place?
- As the journalist Jonah Goldberg pointed out, there has long been a strand in American thought which has fetishized the small town and denigrated the big city. Think of the numerous films where the city slicker finds himself in the backwaters, where he is taken under the wing of a taciturn old guy who teaches him the true meaning of life (much of Jordan Peterson’s success, I think, is down to his age, accent and demeanour allowing him to play this role to a tee) leading him to turn his back on his old ways. Or the equally numerous films in which the high-flying city girl returns to her hometown and realises that what she really needs is the love of the carpenter/fireman/employee of any occupation which requires putting on muscle and taking off shirting whom she had dumped after high school in her desperation to “get on”. This is not a hard and fast rule, of course,(think of Deliverance) but, like Americans who base their understanding of France on Paris, we often think America is New York when it really isn’t.
- Walz’s mistake is not so much his love of small-town America, but his belief that his way is the only way (something Birbalsingh appears, on occasion, to share). Chadron State College (no, me neither) was good enough for him, so it is good enough for everyone. He is not, of course, alone in this. Most of us believe, and many of us expend much effort in getting others to believe, that we are doing the right things in the right way. Most of us are wrong about this most of the time. We may be doing the right things in the right way for people like us in our time and place, but different people in different places may well be better advised to do completely different things in a completely different way. Only the insecure need others to be like them.
- There was a summer in my youth when, if love was not all around (Oxford rejoiced in the title of the country’s most under-sexed university) Oasis certainly was, What’s the Story? Morning Glory miasmically spreading out of every window in the quad like aural covid. My inner cynic slightly wonders whether the wall to wonderwall coverage their reunion has received reflects the fact that those young enough to have listened to them are now old enough to set the news agenda. There are few more powerful forces in nature than the desire of the middle-aged to reclaim their receding youth.
- Even my mother has got in on the act, describing 80 as merely “approaching late middle age”.
- There is a peculiar joy in reconnecting with an old friend. And a peculiar surprise when you immediately relate to each other as you had way back when, no matter how many different waters have flowed under how many different bridges. If we are never entirely who we once were, we are never entirely not who we once were. Part of Horace “avoided the goddess of death”, part of us avoids the goddess of time.
- Competence is knowing how to follow the rules. Mastery is knowing when to break the rules.
- We ended the last of these pieces with a quote, so let us conclude today with another from everyone’s favourite sex-mad, pipe-smoking pacifist, Bertrand Russell: “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.